In the months since the March premiere of the viral social media series “Boy Room,” millions of consumers—largely Gen Zers and young millennials—have watched comedian Rachel Coster tour the cluttered and grimy dwellings of young men living in New York and Philadelphia. 

Between comments expressing disgust and shock at the men’s messy living conditions, viewers have repeatedly implored the production company behind the series, Gymnasium, to renovate the rooms investigated by Coster.

So, for the second season of “Boy Room,” Gymnasium teamed up with Amazon Prime to transform the unkempt bedrooms shown off in the series into neat and stylish spaces. 

For each of the 16 episodes of season two of “Boy Room,” the first of which premiered today, Amazon Prime is supplying furniture, decor and other items for Gymnasium to use in its room makeovers, said Amy Powell, Amazon’s head of entertainment marketing. The new weekly episodes, which are roughly two minutes long and air on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, follow the typical “Boy Room” format for their first half before Amazon Prime steps in to deliver a stack of packages for the Gymnasium team to use in their renovation. The second half of each episode then focuses on revealing the refurbished spaces to the young man whose room Coster explored. 

The collaboration arose from Powell stumbling upon an episode of “Boy Room” earlier this year and connecting with Adam Faze, the co-founder and “head coach” of Gymnasium, to pitch the idea of turning the second season of the series into a version of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” aimed at Gen Z, she said. 

Powell viewed the series as an opportunity for Amazon to extend its branded content strategy in the growing landscape of social-first video series. “For ‘Boy Room,’ what was really important to us was to create a season two with the Gymnasium team that only Amazon Prime could pull off,” she said, referring to the retail giant’s ability to ship the items needed for the room renovation in a matter of hours.

Indeed, each episode—from Coster’s exploration of the room to the reveal of its Amazon-sponsored makeover—was filmed within 24 hours, Faze said. 

Additionally, the partnership ties into Amazon’s broader creator marketing strategy for the holiday season, Powell said. All the items featured in the “Boy Room” renovations will be added to an Amazon storefront sorted by product category, effectively making the series a shoppable experience for its largely Gen Z audience, she said. 

“We’re putting it out right as we go into Black Friday [and other] sales events,” Powell said. “Adam and I joke a lot that moms and girlfriends will DM him saying, ‘Can you please help my boyfriend?’ or ‘Can you please help my son?’ And the good news is now you, too, can go to the ‘Boy Room’ storefront and buy the right gift for your boyfriend or for your son or whoever.”

Influencer storefronts are a core element of Amazon’s holiday marketing strategy this year. Last month, Amazon mailed out a holiday catalog, aimed at Gen Z shoppers, containing several QR codes that directed consumers to the storefronts of creators such as TikTok star Josh Richards and lifestyle influencer and entrepreneur Ellie Zeiler. And last week, Amazon invited hundreds of its influencer partners to a holiday soirée meant to encourage them to leverage Amazon storefronts to highlight products from TikTok-viral brands such as Sol de Janeiro and Ouai in their holiday gift guides and content tied to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

Also read: Amazon toy catalog is a holiday season must-have

Gen Z’s TV

Amazon is the first brand to sponsor a Gymnasium series; other shows include the game show “Bodega Run” and “Clockwork Dynasty,” a “Pawn Stars”-esque series that deals exclusively in wristwatches, Faze said. 

When Powell approached Gymnasium about sponsoring the second season of “Boy Room,” Faze jumped at the opportunity to team up with Amazon because he felt it would “genuinely improve the show” and “make it extensively larger than it had been,” he said. Without a sponsor like Amazon, Gymnasium wouldn’t have the production capability to meet the audience demand to add a renovation component to “Boy Room,” he said. 

The crew behind the first season of the series consisted of just three people, Faze said. Partnering with Amazon enabled Gymnasium to triple the size of the team for the second season.

“This was seriously the dream as soon as we started getting those comments,” Faze said. “To even think this is possible is really a sign of how much change has happened in the entertainment industry in the last few years … We want to make the next generation of hit TV shows in these places where audiences already are, and that's only possible by partnering with brands like Amazon.” 

Sponsoring social media series such as “Boy Rooms” is a growing strategy among advertisers looking to get in front of Gen Z. Popular online series such as “Recess Therapy” and “What’s Poppin? With Davis!” regularly secure sponsors ranging from Zillow to Lysol—though, unlike Amazon Prime and “Boy Room,” those partnerships typically only include one or two sponsored episodes.

Nearly half (47%) of Gen Zers surveyed for Deloitte’s 2024 “Digital Media Trends” report cited social media videos and livestreams as their favorite type of video content. And, according to data from Morning Consult, 35% of Gen Zers spend more than four hours each day on social media platforms. 

The audience tuning into “Boy Rooms” is largely composed of 18-to-29-year-old consumers, Faze said, “and there’s a consistent viewership of at least a million people on every episode.” On TikTok alone, the first season of the “Boy Room” amassed 25 million views and 1.7 million likes across its 14 episodes, according to Gymnasium. 

“This [partnership] might be one of the first of its kind, but it’s certainly not the last,” Faze said. “And I think we will look back to a moment like this and realize that this was a huge paradigm shift in short-form entertainment.”